(EurekAlert)
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee have for the first time successfully characterized the earliest structural formation of the disease type of the protein that causes Huntington's disease. The incurable, hereditary neurological disorder is always fatal and affects one in 10,000 Americans...5/18

(Knoxville News Sentinel) Gene Ice has been named the director of the Materials Science and Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Michelle Buchanan, the associate lab director for physical sciences, made the announcement today...5/18

(Daily Tech) The scientists at ORNL estimate that billions of dollars is lost every year in waste heat from electronic devices like central processing units (CPUs). Server farms spend millions a year to simply cool down their fields of racked computers. Waste heat is also a major source of energy loss in automobiles. To that end, a team led by Scott Hunter has developed [press release] tiny piezoelectric generators that use a tiny cantilever, approximately 1 mm^2 in size...5/17

(Washington Post)
A new, 10-year strategic plan for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex demonstrates that as the size of the arsenal shrinks because of a new arms control treaty with Russia, the effectiveness and life span of the United States’s weapons will increase...5/18

(CNN)
Think we're in hock up to our eyeballs now? Wait till 2025. That's the message behind a World Bank report this week that imagines what the global economy will look like in a decade and a half...5/18

(NY Times) With Democrats citing last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a cautionary tale, the Senate on Wednesday decisively rejected a Republican plan to allow more coastal oil and gas exploration and to speed the issuance of drilling permits to oil companies...5/19

(Popular Science) The U.N. health agency may have decided way back in 1996 that the remaining stores of live smallpox virus--kept in facilities in Atlanta and Russia--be destroyed, but the virus has remained alive so researchers can examine it, creating vaccines and other cures...5/18